A brief thread on the life, religion, and language of Omar ibn Sa’id, author of the only known Arabic-language autobiography of an enslaved person in the United States.

Omar ibn Sa’id was a Fula man from what is now Senegal. He studied Islamic sciences and mathematics under prominent scholars before his enslavement in 1807 at age 37.

In his autobiography, he writes that he was taken “to a place called Charleston in the Christian language.”
He escaped from his first enslaver, but was recaptured and jailed. He wrote in Arabic on the walls of his cell, attracting the attention of the Governor of North Carolina and his brother, who took Omar to their home, where he remained until his death in 1864.
He continued to write short Arabic theological and philosophical texts through his life - his autobiography in 1831, letters, annotations in his Bible, and passages from the Qur’an.
He converted to Christianity in 1820, but his relationship to Christianity was always ambiguous

He writes more about Jesus after his conversion, but the language he uses is consistent with Islamic views of Jesus - المسيح (Messiah) and سيدنا (our master), but not ربنا, our Lord
He also begins his autobiography by writing out Surat al-Mulk, a Qur’anic chapter often used as an anti-slavery polemic.

Al-Mulk begins “Blessed is the One in whose hands is all dominion, and he is powerful above all things”. Only God has sovereignty, it asserts.
The Arabic text at the beginning of this thread is his copy of al-Mulk.
On a small card, he also copied Surat an-Nasr, which describes a mass conversion to Islam in Mecca. In an ironic twist, on the back of the card another person writes that it is an Arabic translation of the Lord’s Prayer.
You can view the Omar ibn Sa’id collection at the Library of Congress online

https://t.co/pwFOPD3K50
In case this thread does numbers, I encourage you to donate to and support Muslims working toward prison abolition @BelieverBailOut.

https://t.co/iP8rUM5FWi

More from History

This is THEFT!

Indians had Algebra BEFORE Mμslim prophet & religion was even born.

Here is Bakhshali Manuscript dating back to 3rd century CE. It is an Algebraic treatise. Have you anything like this from the Arabian desert? No, you simply plagiarized Algebra from Indians! https://t.co/cWXRNYMgDt


The Bakhshali manuscript, which has been carbon dated to 3rd century CE, is an ancient Hindu treatise on Arithmetic and Algebra.

The Algebraic problems deal with simultaneous equations, quadratic equations, arithmetic
geometric progressions & quadratic indeterminate equations.


Bakhshali isn't earliest Indian Algebraic treatise. Early Algebra is found in Shulba Sutras dating back to at least 800 BC. Traditional Algebra reached its pinnacle in the works of Aryabhata & Bhaskara.

What makes Bakhshali special is it offers mathematical proof to its theories


It is surprising to see that even after the ancient Indian algebraic treatise has been carbon dated to 3rd century CE by Oxford, they persist with "oh we invented Algebra. It is Halal".

A brief examination of the origins of "Halal Algebra" follows

https://t.co/eFIZ98FDrI


The earliest work of "Arabic Algebra" is the "Al-Kitāb Al-Jabr wal-muqābala" by Al Khwarizmi. The term "Algebra" comes from this book ("Al Jabr").

Before writing his treatise, Al Khwarizmi visited India. His book is a plagiarism from Indian Mathematics and an obvious one at that

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Legacy site *downloads* ~630 KB CSS per theme and writing direction.

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44 media queries
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50 unique background colors
46 unique font sizes
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PWA *incrementally generates* ~30 KB CSS that handles all themes and writing directions.

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The legacy site's CSS is what happens when hundreds of people directly write CSS over many years. Specificity wars, redundancy, a house of cards that can't be fixed. The result is extremely inefficient and error-prone styling that punishes users and developers.

The PWA's CSS is generated on-demand by a JS framework that manages styles and outputs "atomic CSS". The framework can enforce strict constraints and perform optimisations, which is why the CSS is so much smaller and safer. Style conflicts and unbounded CSS growth are avoided.
The entire discussion around Facebook’s disclosures of what happened in 2016 is very frustrating. No exec stopped any investigations, but there were a lot of heated discussions about what to publish and when.


In the spring and summer of 2016, as reported by the Times, activity we traced to GRU was reported to the FBI. This was the standard model of interaction companies used for nation-state attacks against likely US targeted.

In the Spring of 2017, after a deep dive into the Fake News phenomena, the security team wanted to publish an update that covered what we had learned. At this point, we didn’t have any advertising content or the big IRA cluster, but we did know about the GRU model.

This report when through dozens of edits as different equities were represented. I did not have any meetings with Sheryl on the paper, but I can’t speak to whether she was in the loop with my higher-ups.

In the end, the difficult question of attribution was settled by us pointing to the DNI report instead of saying Russia or GRU directly. In my pre-briefs with members of Congress, I made it clear that we believed this action was GRU.
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